In this excerpt from Lawrence Grobel's new book The Art of the Interview: Lessons From A Master of the Craft, the author focuses on the daunting challenge of getting the goods from celebrities too insecure, private, boring or smart to open up.
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PISSED OFF: Simple things set Robert De Niro off. His personal life was off-limits; the only thing he would talk about was his career.
De Niro is an interviewer's nightmare. He is a very private man who doesn't like to talk to the press and when he does talk, he doesn't have very much to say.
Anyone who has read even one interview by Lawrence Grobel knows that he is in a position to apply the word "art" to the process of getting a person of some renown or other to reveal his or herself in a new and interesting way. Grobel has the skills, the breadth of personal experience, the innate curiosity and--this is rarer than you think--the commitment to preparation that indeed transform the mere asking of questions into an art. So as Grobel claims in his new book The Art of the Interview, "When a subject has made up his or her mind not to talk, you have to accept that you may not get anywhere trying to get them to change their minds," you have to realize this doesn't mean he won't knock himself out trying. His chapter titled "I Don't Want to Talk About That!" is a tutorial in fencing with defensive celebrities. Subjects from Harrison Ford to Norman Mailer wiggle instructively, and Grobel shows the various degrees of difficulty in pinning the slippery devils down. In his interview with Jodie Foster, who refuses as a matter of policy to discuss her sexuality or John Hinckley Jr., the wannabe assassin who fixated on her, Grobel also shows what the wall looks like when you hit it. After implacably failing to fall for Grobel's indirect lures into her two taboo personal spaces, Foster rewards his efforts by adding a third:
GROBEL: Your mother has said that your strength maybe came from being raised without a father. Would you agree?
FOSTER: I don't know. For a lot of people that's been a disaster in their lives. I don't talk about him. It's something that doesn't exist in my life, so I choose not to talk about it.
GROBEL: I'll drop the subject...
FOSTER: No, no, that's your job to ask. And it's my job not to answer.
As that exchange and the following excerpts show, there's entertainment and revelation to be had even when celebrities just say no.
How do you get someone to open up? Obviously, it's not going to happen in a controlled situation where the clock is running and you have a lot of territory you want to cover. Because intimate questions take time to ask, and more time to go back to, and even more time to get answered.
Family problems are often subjects that people would rather avoid talking about. I once asked Harrison Ford about his grandfather, who had been a blackface comedian in vaudeville. He told me: "It was a rough life, and my father is very unwilling to talk about it. He had a rough time when he was growing up. My grandfather was an alcoholic. When he died, he left my father a virtual orphan. His mother was unable to care for them, so he and his brother were raised by nuns in an orphanage."
It was an area worth exploring, but not for Ford, who said all he wanted to [in those few words].
When I did a cable TV interview with Norman Mailer and brought up a subject that was never very comfortable for him, he may not have answered in depth, but his responses were such that you can feel the tension in our exchange, and that's what makes it work.
GROBEL: You're getting angry with me now...
MAILER: No. Edgy.
GROBEL: OK. You blamed early success as the reason for the breakup of your first marriage...
MAILER: I'm not getting angry, I'm getting offended. You want to discuss my life. I'm not going to give you my life. My life is my material. I would give you my life no more than I would give you my mate. That belongs to me, not to an interviewer.
[The novelist] Saul Bellow [once] came back at me, "Why do interviewers ask questions that they wouldn't ask their neighbor for fear of being punched in the nose?"
One method in an interviewer's bag of tricks is to bring up something someone said to get a rise out of the person being interviewed. It's not necessarily to get "you and him" fighting, though it can often lead to memorable, and quotable, remarks. When I once asked Al Pacino about some negative remark critic Pauline Kael made about him (in her review of Serpico, she wrote that as he grew his beard, she couldn't distinguish him from Dustin Hoffman), he responded, "Is that after she had the shot glass removed from her throat?" That one line has had a life of its own over the years.
With Oliver Stone in 1997, I brought up a remark actor Joe Pesci made about him, that he was a terrific director but a "piece of shit" as a person. Pesci had given a memorable performance as the bewigged David Ferrie in Stone's controversial JFK and I asked the director if Pesci ever called him to deny what he had said.
STONE: No, he wrote me a note of apology for saying it publicly. He's known to have a temper. Joe's a strange guy. In his own way, he probably felt threatened, but I didn't pick up on it. How many actors get called a "piece of shit"? You know who else did that to me recently, out of the blue? Gore Vidal was all over the goddamn newspapers saying he hated my work and that he had blown me off when I tried to get him to do Alexander the Great for me. Which was bullshit. I've very rarely seen that degree of hostility. I've known Gore Vidal for years, off and on. In fact, when he offered to write Alexander the Great for me in 1990 at his villa in Ravello, Italy, I turned his ultra-homoerotic suggestions down. He's bitten by a temper. It's festered for years. People react to me without my knowing it. Artists are very jealous, angry people. They're the most envious people in the world.
Stone's remarks and Pacino's response to Kael are answers to Bellow's question about why interviewers ask people questions that they wouldn't ask their neighbor for fear of being punched in the nose. Still, Mailer's remark about his life being his own and his not wanting to give it up to an interviewer is something every journalist has to contend with. Mailer's sentiment echoed something Marlon Brando said to me back when I interviewed him on his island in Tahiti for Playboy in 1978. This interview would prove to be one of the most laborious but fascinating of my career. "I'm not going to lay myself at the feet of the American public and invite them into my soul," he told me.
In a phone call prior to our meeting, Brando had said that he only wanted to talk about the Indians. I said that we could cover the subject extensively, but not exclusively. He then asked to see my questions, which I refused to show him. Without my realizing it, we were in a negotiation. He made certain demands; I didn't want to give in to any of them. But I also knew that if I didn't come up with a solution that would pacify him he would tell me that he wouldn't meet with me and that would be that. So I suggested that instead of sending him my questions, could I send the topics that I hoped to explore with him? He agreed. And I sent him a very short list: The Indians. Civil Rights. Social Injustice. Politics. Men. Women. Entertainment. The Arts. The World. I was testing his sense of humor. Either he would shake his head, laugh, and say come to Tahiti, or he would say I'm nuts and tell me to forget it. He told me to come.
We taped three long days about the Indians. Once in a while I'd change the subject. For instance, I brought up a comedy he did with David Niven, Bedtime Story. Brando said that he couldn't do comedy, and I used that negative to transition to a question about how he worked as an actor, thus moving away from our previous topic, Indians.
GROBEL: Another "can't do" associated with you is your inability or refusal to memorize lines. Do you have a bad memory, or is it that you feel remembering lines affects the spontaneity of your performance?
He seemed to welcome the chance to stop thinking about the Indians and began to answer.
BRANDO: If you watch somebody's face when they're talking, they don't know what kind of expression is going to be on their face. You can see people search for words, for ideas, reaching for a concept, a feeling, whatever. [But] if the words are there in the actor's mind...Oh, you got me! [laughing]. You got me right in the bush. I'm talking about acting, aren't I?
GROBEL: For a man who likes to talk, it's a pity that you brake yourself.
BRANDO: I'm fascinated about anything. I'll talk for seven hours about splinters.
GROBEL: But will you talk for seven hours about your career?
BRANDO: Of course not. Not two seconds about it.
Over the course of the 10 days I spent with him, I did anything and everything possible to unlock the mystery that is Marlon Brando.
GROBEL: Does being labeled a Method actor mean anything to you?
BRANDO: No.
GROBEL: Does it bother you?
BRANDO: B-o-r-e. Bore.
GROBEL: Is that what a Method actor does--to bore through to the core of an actor's being?
BRANDO: It bores through and goes beyond the frontiers of endurable anguish of interviews.
We're playing here, but we're not through.
GROBEL: Well, this painful interview is almost over.
BRANDO: Oh, listen, it hasn't been painful at all. It's been delightful. Although I feel like I got in a rummage sale: would you want this dress? No, that schmatte. How about this corset? Well, we could take the rubber out and make a slingshot out of it. I'm dizzy. We've gone from the temples of Karnak to the halls of William O. Douglas. GROBEL: Speaking of temples, do you believe in God?
And that led to our discussion about God, order in the universe, life on this planet, aging, death, which got him to quote Shakespeare, which led to the rumor that he was going to do King Lear on Broadway--and so it went, back and forth, moving from topic to topic like the rummage sale he thought it was. It wasn't easy, but getting this complex and reclusive man to speak was definitely worth the effort. One of his favorite books was Stephen Potter's The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship. Thus, his tactics come as no surprise: You try to catch him, he tries to avoid being caught.
With Robert De Niro, it was different. He wasn't much of a player. He was as interested in being interviewed as he probably is in visiting the dentist or a cardiologist. De Niro is an interviewer's nightmare. He is a very private man who doesn't like to talk to the press--and when he does talk, he doesn't have very much to say. It took me seven sessions on two coasts to finish my interview with him in 1988, because he refused to sit still for more than 90 minutes. Every time we started to actually get comfortable, he would look at his watch and say, "I've gotta go." Finally I asked him [where he had to go]. "I'm meeting friends," he said.
What set De Niro off were simple things. When we were in New York there were sirens outside the hotel window, and I observed that the sounds of Manhattan were very different than the sounds of L.A. and then asked him what it was like growing up in the city. He jumped up from the couch where he was sitting and started yelling at me: "You see why I can't do this? You see? I just don't want to do this."
When he calmed down, I tried again.
GROBEL: Didn't you once belong to a street gang?
DE NIRO: That's a whole other thing to talk about, not here. No big deal.
I tried another angle.
GROBEL: Wasn't your nickname Bobby Milk?
DE NIRO: That was one of a few I had.
GROBEL: What were the others?
DE NIRO: I don't want to get into that.
GROBEL: Why Milk?
DE NIRO: Maybe because I drank milk. I don't want to go too much into that.
GROBEL: We don't have to go too much, but maybe just enough to get some idea of where you came from...
DE NIRO: Listen... [reaches over, turns off the tape recorders, talks about the pressures on actors to do interviews]
At this point I realized that an "in-depth" interview with De Niro was going to be out of the question. But I just couldn't let him get off that easily.
GROBEL: What kind of kid were you?
DE NIRO: It's hard to talk about yourself, about what kind of kid you were, and so on. So I don't feel that disposed to it.
GROBEL: Why is it hard?
DE NIRO: It just is. That's why I don't do interviews. I think it's self-evident. I know people who don't want to talk about things in their life. It's a personal thing and it's really nobody's business.
What De Niro considered nobody's business was the stuff that makes interviews interesting. I brought up his past, but that was off-limits. I tried the present, but he didn't like talking about what he was doing. I asked about future plans, and he told me that he didn't want to speak about that because he might "jinx" any projects in the works. "Well, Bob," I finally said in exasperation, "where do we go from here?" His response was to lean forward for the fourth time and turn off the tape recorders before asking me if he could see a transcript of our conversation. I told him no, that wouldn't be possible. He then gave me his reasons why he thought I should make it available.
DE NIRO: I know it's a form of censorship and that's not good, and I know it takes away from what you're doing if I could look at it...[But] now I have to edit my own thoughts. There's a lot of things I'd like to say, but I don't feel I am very clear in my thinking right now...
And there it was: De Niro's fear of being interviewed. He didn't feel that he could articulate his thoughts, he didn't want to come across as dull or boring, he was insecure about his opinions. What can one say to convince the man that whatever he had to say would be devoured by tens of thousands of readers who admired him for the brilliance of his acting? The only thing we were able to agree on was that he was one tough nut to crack. So I stopped trying to get him to talk about anything personal and steered the conversation to his films. There were certainly plenty of those to discuss, and unlike Brando, De Niro was willing to talk about playing the young Don Corleone, the angry Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, the raging bull Jake La Motta, the Russian roulette-playing soldier from The Deer Hunter, the brash Rupert Pupkin from King of Comedy. There was plenty more I wanted to discuss after we covered his career, but he wasn't going to hang his laundry out to dry in public. I knew it. He knew it. I also knew that a good part of our interview would include De Niro's reluctance to talk, his turning off the recorders, his wanting to leave. This was what it was like interviewing Bobby De Niro. And that is the portrait that was drawn of the man. De Niro was the incarnation of Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit, always late for a very important date. And that date was never going to be talking intimately or revealingly to an interviewer.
With De Niro and Brando, I had the chance to capture two great actors who rarely spoke to the press and were both reluctant to reveal themselves. One wrote me a letter in which he was initially annoyed that our interview didn't totally concentrate on the plight of the American Indian, but then he thanked me for making him "more articulate than I remember being." The other called me a "Judas" when I saw him at Pacino's 50th birthday party, angry that I made him look, to his mind, bad.
Twelve years later, I was with Pacino at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival, where De Niro introduced Pacino's film Chinese Coffee. Afterward, about a dozen people went to eat in the Village, and De Niro sat opposite me and said, "I don't know if I'm supposed to like you or hate you."
"Oh, you like me, Bob," I said with a smile. "Though the last time I saw you, you were shaking my wife's hand, saying, 'Nice to meet you, I hate your husband.'"
"Yeah," De Niro laughed, "I probably said that."
"But you were smiling," I added. The problem, in De Niro's eyes, was that I should have been more sensitive to his indecision and discomfort. "It works both ways," I said to him. "How do you think I felt, expecting you to show up at my hotel at 9 in the morning and you didn't come until 5 in the afternoon?"
"That's unlike me to do that," De Niro said. "Usually if I'm going to be late, I have someone call and let the person know."
"I guess that time it slipped through the cracks," I said.
"Oh, now I get it, it was revenge!" he said.
"Maybe we should try it again some time."
"Yeah, maybe we should. I'll talk to you, you'll print how I didn't want to talk, and I'll go, 'He did it again!'"
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